Crossing the gender divide

Can authors authentically write from the point of view of the opposite sex? Jane Sullivan considers a timeless dilemma.

The British novelist Amanda Craig had a weird experience when she read
Brazzaville Beach, a novel by William Boyd with a female central
character. "Its narrator, though satisfyingly brave, appeared to have no
breasts," she wrote.

Craig spent a couple of years writing a novel, In A Dark Wood, from
a man's point of view, so she became very interested in other writers' attempts
at crossing into the mind of the opposite sex. She was annoyed and amused by
what she found - particularly when William Boyd's brave heroine ran through the
African jungle without once being troubled by her bouncing breasts.

"The funniest thing is when men describe what they imagine what sex must be
like for a woman," she wrote in an article for Author magazine. "As with John
Cleland's pornographic masterpiece, Fanny Hill, there is always a lot
about the stupendous role of the penis; and no humour, or tenderness."

But women writing as men didn't fare any better. "Apart from Sherlock Holmes,
no man created by a man ever notices how somebody is dressed; male characters by
women always do."

And none of the authors she castigates seemed to have any idea of what it
would be like to be the opposite sex looking into a mirror. "Male novelists
never seem to grasp how wracked by self-doubt and insecurity most women are.
Women writers fail to understand that when a man looks at himself in the mirror
he tends to actually like what he sees."

Not that Craig escaped criticism herself. When her novel In A Dark
Wood came out, the reviews were mixed. Some people found Benedick, her
hero, a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown exploring his mother's past, an
unbearably obnoxious character. And one woman reviewer picked her up on the
"implausible" detail of Benedick confronting his bullying father and feeling his
own penis shrink and crawl.

More and more men these days are writing books that appeal primarily to
women. This means that women are often the central characters or narrators, and
the books focus closely on the things supposedly dear to a woman's heart.

To do that successfully, the male writer must think and feel like a
woman.

But can a male writer get successfully into a woman's head, and vice versa?
Apart from a few carpers like Craig - or the novelist Lucretia Stewart, who
insisted that we cannot know what an orgasm feels like for the opposite sex -
nobody seems to ask this question much any more.

Feminists once asked it about male writers; and going back further into the
history of literature, men questioned whether women could write successfully
about anybody. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and the Bronte sisters had to take
on male pen-names in order to have their work taken seriously.

But today, the most controversial area is race and culture rather than
gender. White authors agonise about their attempts to create the voice of a
Tasmanian Aborigine, or a Maori ghost, and are sometimes attacked for even
daring to try; yet they hop in and out of the hearts, minds and bodies of the
opposite sex and nobody turns a hair.

Australian writer Thomas Keneally typifies this growing confidence. Back in
1992, when he wrote in a woman's voice for the first time in his novel Woman
of the Inner Sea, he was "nervous as hell" about its reception. He
remembered complaints when he was young that D.H. Lawrence could not write about
women, and was worried that young female critics might reach the same conclusion
about "an ageing Aussie sexist" male.

Eight years later, he was writing in the voice of three women in his novel
Bettany's Book, and seemed much more relaxed about the experience.
Novels came from the myth-making part of the human brain, he said. "All the
material that blokes need to be women exists in that part of the brain, and vice
versa. And writing a novel like this involved the profounder brain where all the
truths lie, and you don't know they're there until they emerge."

Have we at long last arrived at the time that Virginia Woolf dreamed of, the
time of the truly androgynous writer? In her essay A Room of One's Own, she praised the famous androgynous
writers of the past - Shakespeare, Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, Coleridge - but
was dubious about Milton and Ben Jonson, Wordsworth and Tolstoy, because they
had "a dash too much of the male", and Proust, because he was "a little too much
of a woman".

Woolf's ideal was to be "woman-manly or man-womanly ... Some
collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before
the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be
consummated". And she showed a playful version of that marriage in her own book
Orlando, where the young hero lives for hundreds of years - sometimes in the
body of a man, sometimes in the body of a woman.

But today, many people are uneasy about Woolf's gender-bending vision. The
prevailing wisdom of popular culture is that the sexes are at opposite poles.
Books such as Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Mars encourage the
view that vast gulfs of understanding have to be crossed before a man and a
woman can even live together, let alone write about each other. And if men do
not talk about their feelings, as the pop psychology books tell us, how can
women be sure what those feelings are?

The Venusians may be dithering, but lots of Martians have been storming the
boundaries in recent years.

It might be because the story needs a woman to tell it. It might be because
these men like a challenge and find writing as a woman a liberating experience.
Or as Keneally says, it might be because writing in the opposite gender gets
them in touch with the profound, myth-making part of the brain.

Or it might be because women are now the majority of book buyers and readers
- Amanda Craig quotes an agent, Giles Gordon, who says that publishers are no
longer interested in books about men because these sell so badly.

This kind of book has illustrious forebears. Two of the greatest 19th Century
novels, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, were written by men
exploring the turbulent inner lives of women caught up in adultery.

Flaubert's book caused him a great deal of wrestling, which was partly to do
with entering the mind of a woman engulfed in tawdry dreams of romance and
consumer lifestyle.

In her essay on Flaubert, A.S. Byatt says that, on the one hand, he saw his
material as totally alien to him. "Writing this book I am like a man playing the
piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles," he wrote to his mistress,
Louise Colet. On the other hand, he entered entirely into his creation: "Today,
for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on
an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the
leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them
almost close their love-drowned eyes."

No wonder he famously said: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." And when he killed
her off at the end of the novel, Byatt says, "he imagined her agony so intensely
that he tasted the bitterness of the arsenic in his own mouth, to the point of
vomiting".

Men are still fascinated by women's turbulent inner lives. Nick Hornby and
Roddy Doyle, two blokey best-selling writers, turned to women central characters
for their recent novels How To Be Good and The Woman Who Walked
Into Doors. So did Ian McEwen with his novel Atonement, and
J.M.Coetzee with Elizabeth Costello.

Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White, has
specialised in books about damaged women. Michael Cunningham wrote from the
point of view of a fictional Virginia Woolf and two other women in his novel
The Hours. And in popular fiction, Arthur Golden scored a perennial
bestseller with his Memoirs of a Geisha.

Australian male writers who have written books with central female characters
include Alex Miller, Rodney Hall, Frank Moorhouse and Tim Winton. Indeed, it was
probably Patrick White who started the trend here with books such as The
Aunt's Story.

The British writer Sebastian Faulks is typical of the new breed of
an-writing-for-woman. He writes "crossover" novels that are successful both with
critics and with the mass market. Books such as Charlotte Grey,
Birdsong and On Green Dolphin Street are about the masculine world
of adventure and war and politics, but his heroines play a prominent part in
this world. Irresistible romance is always a central theme, there are intensely
moving moments of death and loss, and Faulks usually obliges with some sizzling
sex scenes.

In Charlotte Grey, a novel that was filmed with Cate Blanchett in
the central role, his heroine was a fighter in the French resistance. The novel
gained the dubious distinction of a Bad Sex award - "Meanwhile her ears were
filled with the sound of a soft but frantic gasping and it was some time before
she identified it as her own" - and Charlotte then declares: "This is so
wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments."
(Faulks admirers would say the scene was taken out of context.)

Fortunately, Faulks stopped short of bringing us a first-hand account of
childbirth in Birdsong. But this has not been a taboo area to other
male writers: Peter Carey had a brave go in his novel The Tax
Inspector.

How hard is it to cross the gender boundary? Some writers maintain there's no
problem at all. "I just worried about making her a highly detailed and realistic
human," Michael Connolly said of Cassie, his central character in the novel
Void Moon. "I did not write this book thinking 'What would a woman do
here, what would she do there?' and so on."

Michael Kahn, who writes legal thrillers with a female heroine, says "much of
what a novelist does is observe ¤ many of us tend to observe members of the
opposite sex more closely".

On writing in the male voice, American writer Jill McCorkle said: "If I'm in
the right place emotionally with a character, the other parts seem to fall into
place."

Others find the transition much tougher. The internet is full of writers'
sites where people give earnest online advice to others about how to do it. In
the online Writer magazine, "Kelly", who writes techno thrillers, is wrestling
with his first leading female character. The advice includes: get women to read
over your work; watch a woman to see how she moves and what she does; go to the
women's studies area at the local bookstore; look through women's magazines and
make a collage of the outfits your character might wear.

But there seems to be remarkably little advice for women writing about men.
It is sometimes suggested that gay men can enter more easily into a woman's
sensibility, but I have never seen the same claim made for a lesbian writing
about male characters.

Perhaps it is because women writing about men is seen as ordinary: it has
been happening quietly and unobtrusively for at least two centuries, and
contemporary novelists such as Rose Tremain or Annie Proulx do it all the
time.

A man taking a woman's point of view in a novel is either praised for his
great achievement or told off for not doing it right. Women who take a man's
point of view do not get praised or blamed.

Only when a woman immerses herself thoroughly in a masculine world, as Pat
Barker did in her Regeneration trilogy about the traumas of World War
I, is she thought of as doing anything extraordinary.

Lately, women have been pushing the boundaries by writing from the point of
view of sexually deviant or extremely violent men - characters that most male
writers are reluctant to tackle.

Joyce Carol Oates got into the mind of a serial killer in her novel
Zombie. A young American writer, Amy Homes, caused enormous controversy
six years ago with her novel The End of Alice, in which a pedophile reflected in
graphic detail on the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. Playboy
magazine complained there was a double standard: a female author could get away
with things that in a male would be condemned as misogyny.

Australian women writers have also explored this theme: Kate Grenville
entered the mind of a man who raped his own daughter in Dark Places,
and Elizabeth Jolley wrote an oblique, wistful novel about a man who might be a
pedophile (Lovesong).

The ultimate gender bender novel is literally androgynous. Virginia Woolf
pioneered the form in Orlando. Other books where the hero is both a man
and a woman include Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge and its sequel
Myron (highly outrageous in their day); Angela Carter's Passion of
New Eve; and most recently, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex.

Perhaps the boldest gender-bending novel is Jeanette Winterson's Written
On The Body, a sensual hymn of praise to a beautiful, beloved woman. We
never find out whether her lover is male or female. But here again, nothing is
new. The androgynous narrator goes right back to Homer's Tiresias, the blind
poet who lived as both a man and a woman. Women have better sex than men, he
said. Nine times better.

ACROSS THE GENDERS

CLASSICS

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Two of the great tortured adulterous women of literature,
both created by men. They dare to dream, they fight against society, they drive
themselves to horrible ends. Neither book is a romance; A.S.Byatt calls
Madame Bovary
"the
least romantic book I have ever read".

CONTEMPORARIES

The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker

Three novels - Regeneration, The Eye in the Door
and the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road
- explore the masculine world of the troops, officers and traumas
of World War One. Includes fictional portrayals of real men, such as the war
poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Much praised for its moving realism, including a love scene between two
men.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from the point of view of three women - Virginia
Woolf; a modern New York lesbian version of her heroine Mrs Dalloway; and a 50s
housewife reading Woolf's book. The film won Nicole Kidman her Oscar.

GENDER BENDERS

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

A satirical romp through the ages, in which the hero is first a man and then
a woman. Filmed with an androgynous Tilda Swinton in the title role. The book
was a tribute to Woolf's friend, the bisexual Vita Sackville-West.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Huge, sprawling novel narrated by Cal/Callie, a hermaphrodite who was born as
a girl and later rechristened a boy. "Difficult to imagine any serious male
writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender,"
said Publisher's Weekly.